Advanced technologies incorporated into today's personal communication devices have vastly expanded opportunities for mass collaboration, which has become known as crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing refers generally to distributing tasks by soliciting the participation of loosely defined groups of individual contributors, rather than by establishing formal employment or contractual relationships to secure the labor. A group of contributors may include, for example, individuals responding to a solicitation posted on a certain website, or individuals who are targeted for market research by some other means. Each contributor may perform one or more tasks that generate data that contribute to a defined result, such as proofreading part of a digital version of an ancient text or analyzing a small quantum of a large volume of data. The contributors may also gather and submit data that can be compiled to establish the existence of trends or conditions, such as traffic density. Each contributor may be compensated for the contribution, or participation may be rewarded with intangibles such as personal satisfaction or gaining valuable experience.
Typical crowdsourcing systems and methods indiscriminately accept participation of the contributors, and are limited to static objectives. When implemented in the context of mobile (i.e., portable, wireless and/or otherwise battery-powered) communication devices such as wireless telephones, laptops and PDAs, a potential contributor actively seeks out opportunities by accessing crowdsourcing websites, or makes the wireless communication device available at all times to receive alerts when opportunities are available. Both alternatives tax battery power and may increase data charges or encumber device resources, so crowdsourcing can be unattractive to device users. Furthermore, crowdsourcing from mobile contributors can create challenges for data solicitors who may wish to dynamically target contributors and define objectives.
Finally, indiscriminate crowdsourcing can increase the load on the communications network when unnecessarily large numbers of users are solicited.